Dear Members of the IESG,
An added comment to my previous post, is that I consider that Keith Moore
has indeed recently given the IPP WG more clear guidance on these issues.
However, the IPP WG has spent several months of sometimes almost religious
discussions on these subjects (shared with the HTTP WG), so if the IESG
could come up with some general guidelines for these kind of issues, it
might save other WGs considerable time and effort in the future.
Carl-Uno Manros
At 02:04 PM 7/6/98 PDT, you wrote:
>Dear Members of the IESG,
>
>In recent discussions with Keith Moore in his role as Applications Area
>Director, a couple of rather fundamental questions about Internet protocol
>architecture have come up. As chair of one of the Application Area WGs, I
>have had some difficulty to understand the current policy within the IESG
>and the IAB on the following two aspects, and might have given my WG wrong
>advice on the acceptability of certain technical solutions vs. others from
>an IESG/IAB perspective.
>
>Issue 1 - Firewalls
>===================
>
>Although I have been unable to find much said about firewalls in the IETF
>RFCs (RFC1579 and RFC2356 are the only references that come up), there
>seems to be some undocumented views within the IESG about what is
>appropriate and what is not when it comes to distinguishing different
>applications in firewalls. If such criteria are indeed used by the IESG, I
>think it is urgently needed to document them. They should distinguish
>between outgoing vs. incoming firewalls and should clearly state on which,
>and how many "parameters", filtering must be possible (such as TCP/IP
>address, scheme, port, method, content-type).
>
>Issue 2 - Layering of Applications
>==================================
>
>It has also been discussed whether layering one application on another is
>allowed, and if so, which kind of things can be layered on what, and which
>combinations would be disallowed. This has resulted in debates such as if
>HTTP is specific to web traffic or a more generic transport protocol. I
>think it is particularly important to answer this question in anticipation
>of the HTTP-NG protocol, which is planned for introduction in the IETF
>later this year. To my knowledge, the designers of that protocol have
>explicitly wanted to make a protocol that is a more genereric than the
>current HTTP. Would that be in conflict with the IESGs ideas about what is
>allowed or not over that protocol? Again, any criteria that the IESG will
>be using for this kind of layering decisions should be clearly documented,
>so the WGs have a reasonable chance to stay within the boundaries of what
>the IESG considers to be "correct" design.
>
>Thankful for your feedback on this,
>
>Carl-Uno Manros
>Chair of IETF WG on IPP
>
>
>
>
>Carl-Uno Manros
>Principal Engineer - Advanced Printing Standards - Xerox Corporation
>701 S. Aviation Blvd., El Segundo, CA, M/S: ESAE-231
>Phone +1-310-333 8273, Fax +1-310-333 5514
>Email: manros@cp10.es.xerox.com
>
>